Reality: Fundamental Topics is Metaphysics

Chapter IV: Categories and First Principles

I An orderly way to proceed with the project of investigating reality in the most basic and general terms (and with candid acknowledgment of a selective leaning toward topics of special interest to humans) is to try to set out at the start fundamental concepts and principles, and matters of method. this is somewhat how Aristotle proceeded. At any rate, alongside his major metaphysical treatises—the Metaphysics itself, the Physics, and De Anima—we find a set of writings, called collectively the Organon, concerned with procedural and foundational things. this is where most of what we know as Aristotle’s logic is to be found. the Organon also houses a work particularly important for metaphysics, called the Categories, which seeks to set out various fundamental ways in which substances can be classified and investigated. Aristotle had a metaphysical bias or predilection for substances. it seemed clear to him that they, and above all individual living substances, like Socrates and Fido, have a centrality and in some manner a logical priority in investigating the world that other existing things do not. We may possibly come to some version of Aristotle’s view, but, at least at the outset, we are trying to be more neutral; at any rate, to devise a set of organizing concepts of categories of things that will be as comprehensive as possible, and not just confined to things like individual human beings or dogs (or, for that matter, electrons). C H A P t e R i V Categories and First Principles Categories and First Principles 53 We want, then, to borrow the idea of a systematic outlay of categories from Aristotle, but to use the idea quite independently of his practice or purposes. this indeed has seemed methodologically appropriate and desirable to many other metaphysical inquirers. Alfred north Whitehead, for example, in his ambitious (and often obscure) metaphysical treatise Process and Reality,1 devotes his first post-introductory chapter to developing a highly involved “categoreal scheme,” in whose terms the system of his book is to be understood. II Something else called category theory has developed a life of its own, as a specialized philosophical discipline concerned with fundamental kinds and classifications of things, and what it may or may not be meaningful to ascribe to something of one category in the language (or concepts) of another distinct category.2 (One especially prominent category theorist, of this sort, has been in recent years Fred Sommers.3 ) i shall have things to say in this chapter about both kinds of category theory—that is to say, about category theory as an autonomous field in ontology and the philosophy of language, and about category theory as a preliminary to metaphysical inquiry. Both can be expressed in distinct idioms: either as a matter of language, or as a matter of concepts and things. the view held throughout the present book is that quite often philosophical views can be expressed in a “linguistic mode,” as a matter of words and how they work (practically or for purposes of theory), or, alternatively, as a matter of actual or possible things and their actual or possible properties and relations, and what might or must hold in respect of the latter. these alternatives, as i see them, are not actually equivalent, but they by and large “amount to the same thing.” Characterizing things as a matter of words is not (contrary to the views of many twentieth-century philosophers) an advance upon putting things as a matter of things. indeed, where “language mode” and “reality mode” diverge—certainly where or if they conflict—the latter is always to be preferred. in general, i would argue that philosophy of language (which for the most part would reverse that preference ordering) has gotten “too big for its boots.”4 However, it will often be convenient, and especially in the present context, to phrase our inquiry and its results as a matter of what we do or should prefer to say about the world and its divisions, rather than as a matter of the world and its divisions themselves. this, then, is a first statement of method for the present inquiry. 54 ReALitY: Fundamental topics in Metaphysics Returning to category theory in its particular twentieth-century form, it should be noted that its advocates have characteristically adopted a view which virtually defines their subject for them, but about which i want to be largely...